Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  37. Foss, “The Prairie, A Parable of Death, and Psalms,” in The Composer's Point of View: Essays on Twentieth-Century Choral Music by Those Who Wrote It, ed. Robert Stephan Hines (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), 10.

  38. Thomson, New York Herald Tribune, 16 May 1944. Though he praised Foss's musicianship, he noted that “Mr. Foss's language is elegant, scholastic, dainty. It is dry and clean and pleasant, and it is adjusted for precise depiction rather than for emotional excitement.”

  39. Donald Fuller, “Stravinsky's Visit; New Music in 1945,” Modern Music 22 (March–April 1945): 178; Irving Fine, “Young America: Bernstein and Foss,” Modern Music 22 (May-June 1945): 243. See also Arthur Berger's review of The Prairie score, “Scores and Records,” Modern Music 22 (March-April 1945): 199-201.

  40. Fine, “Young America,” 242.

  41. “A Word from Lukas Foss,” printed as record jacket program note of Lukas Foss: The Prairie, Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, Lukas Foss, conductor, VOX, TV-S 54649, 1976; Foss, “The Prairie, A Parable of Death, and Psalms,” 6.

  42. Foss, “The Prairie, A Parable of Death, and Psalms,” 65.

  43. Ibid., 7.

  44. Foss reordered the text in such a way that a reader of the poem would encounter the texts of Foss's movements in the following order: I, VIa, II, III(part1), III(part4), IV, V, III (parts 2-3), VIc, VIb, IX.

  45. Lukas Foss, comment on Prairie, originally published in Robert Bagar and Louis Biancolli, eds., The Concert Companion (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947), 267-68.

  46. Richard Dyer, CD liner notes for Lukas Foss, The Prairie, (BMOP/sound 1007).

  47. “Champagne & Cornbread,” Time, 29 January 1945.

  48. Foss, comment on Prairie.

  49. Marx, Machine in the Garden, 225.

  50. Berger, “Scores and Records,” 200.

  51. Fine, “Young America,” 243. On page 242, Fine remarked on a tendency “to resort to construction of themes by symmetrically repeated fragments, which are in turn extended by sequence…not only for phrase extension but also for climactic effects, in the manner of the romantics. In his most recent work Foss has aggravated this sequential tendency by the addition of ostinato rhythms.”

  52. Foss, comment on Prairie.

  53. Ibid.

  54. Two fleeting echo moments also begin movement VIb, “O prairie girl,” where trumpet answers the vocal call “Spring slips back with a girl face” and then the soprano soloist repeats herself as if listening: “Any new songs for me? Any new songs?”

  55. Foss, “The Prairie,” 4.

  56. Berger continues: “When he is not so impelled…he shows a soft lyric inspiration and a personal style of which we may expect him to become more keenly aware in the future.” Berger, “Scores and Records,” 200.

  6. POWER IN THE LAND

  1. Lukas Foss, interview with Vivian Perlis (1986). Oral History of American Music project at Yale University; as cited in Richard Dyer, CD liner notes for Lukas Foss: The Prairie, Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Providence Singers, dir. Andrew Clark (BMOP/sound 1007), 8.

  2. Steven Watson, Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism (New York: Random House, 1998), 50.

  3. Thomson, Virgil Thomson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 91-92.

  4. On Thomson's exposure to chant and early polyphony, see, among others, Carol J. Oja, “Virgil Thomson's Harvard Years,” in A Celebration of American Music, ed. Crawford, Lott, and Oja, 327-32.

  5. Nadine Hubbs, The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 20.

  6. Watson, Prepare for Saints, 53.

  7. Thomson, Virgil Thomson, 105.

  8. Thomson, program note, cited in the liner notes for Music of Virgil Thomson (CRI SRD 398), 1979.

  9. Watson, Prepare for Saints, 12.

  10. Anthony Tommasini, Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 22.

  11. Watson, Prepare for Saints, 26; Tommasini, Virgil Thomson, 58.

  12. Thomson to Ruby Gleason, 30 September 1917; see also Thomson to Clara May Gaines Thomson (his mother), 10 October 1917; reprinted in Selected Letters of Virgil Thomson, ed. Tim Page and Vanessa Weeks Page (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 19-22. Thomson, Virgil Thomson, 35.

  13. Thomson, Virgil Thomson, 33. He continued: “Neither then nor later did I have much interest in whether any country involved in the war, including my own, was right or wrong…. I could only think of it as myth-in-action; and acting out myths was a mystery that I had as much right as any other man to get involved in.”

  14. Oja, “Thomson's Harvard Years,” 328-35.

  15. Samuel L. M. Barlow, “Virgil Thomson,” Modern Music 18 (May-June 1941): 248.

  16. See, among others, Victor Fell Yellin, “The Operas of Virgil Thomson,” in Thomson, American Music since 1910 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), 91-109.

  17. Paul Rosenfeld, An Hour with American Music (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1929), 98-99.

  18. Michael Meckna, “Sacred and Secular America: Virgil Thomson's Symphony on a Hymn Tune,” American Music 8 (1990): 474.

  19. For more on The River, see Neil William Lerner, “The Classical Documentary Score in American Films of Persuasion: Contexts and Case Studies, 1936-1945,” PhD diss., Duke University, 1997; and Claudia Jean Widgery, “The Kinetic Temporal Interaction of Music and Film: Three Documentaries of 1930s America,” PhD diss., University of Maryland, 1990.

  20. Meckna, “Sacred and Secular America,” 471, 476.

  21. Tommasini, Virgil Thomson, 33, 57.

  22. Thomson, “A Little about Movie Music,” Modern Music 10 (May-June 1933): 188-91.

  23. Lerner (“Classical Documentary,” 160) also notes similarities between one motive in the Symphony on a Hymn Tune and a repeated melody in the Plow score.

  24. Lerner, “Classical Documentary,” 90. Lorentz refers to the steady drumbeat of a later sequence as “a distant tom tom” (as the first fence post is driven into baked-out ground), and Thomson includes one in his menagerie of percussion, but in this earlier instance the ostinato is played by the timpani.

  25. Lorentz, FDR's Moviemaker: Memoirs and Scripts (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1992), 28. Lorentz's left-wing credentials were substantial, but he was no radical; see William Alexander, Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 97-109.

  26. Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968).

  27. Lorentz, FDR's Moviemaker, 37. J. P. McEvoy, “Young Man with a Camera,” Reader's Digest, August 1940, 74; cited in Robert L. Snyder, Pare Lorentz and the Documentary Film (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 24. “Documented Dust,” Time, 25 May 1936, 47.

  28. Lorentz, McCall's, August 1939; reprinted in Lorentz on Film: Movies 1927-1941 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 170-71.

  29. Study Guide: “The Plow That Broke the Plains” U.S. Documentary Film, (Washington, DC: United States Film Service, Division of the National Emergency Council, 1938), 2, 4-5; Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 26.

  30. Thomson, Virgil Thomson, 259.

  31. Lerner, “Classical Documentary,” esp. chaps. 2, 3, and 6. On page 57, Lerner documents the authors' fluctuations between the British spelling Plough and the American Plow.

  32. Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 14-15. Virgil Thomson papers, Irving S. Gilmore Library, Yale University, Box 29A/90, Folder 14 (hereafter cited as VTP, 29A/90/14).

  33. Thomson to Robert Snyder, 14 December 1961; quoted in Thomson, Selected Letters, 304-5. Lorentz (FDR's Moviemaker, 39) concurs with this version of events: “I had finally cut the footage of The Plow That Broke the Plains down to the running time of Virgil Thomson's full-length score, which was approximately thirty minutes.”

&n
bsp; 34. Lorentz, FDR's Moviemaker, 39.

  35. Thomson, Virgil Thomson, 260.

  36. Robert L. Snyder, introduction to Lorentz on Film, xiv-xv.

  37. Lorentz, McCall's, July 1936; reprinted in Lorentz on Film, 135. W. L. White provides a colorful but sometimes inaccurate vision of the film's collaborative process in “Pare Lorentz,” Scribner's Magazine, January 1939, 7-11, 42.

  38. For comparison of the section titles in three of Lorentz's scenarios to Thomson's full score, see Lerner, “Classical Documentary,” 76. For the concert suite, Thomson selected six movements (Prelude, Grass, Cattle, Blues, Drought, Devastation); the piano suite bears the titles Prelude, Cowboy Songs, Blues, and Devastation. The Plow That Broke the Plains: Suite for Orchestra (Music Press, Inc., 1942); Suite from The Plough That Broke the Plains: Four Pieces for Piano (New York: G. Schirmer, 1942, 1980).

  39. Lorentz, McCall's, July 1936; reprinted in Lorentz on Film, 135-36.

  40. Lerner, “Copland's Music of Wide Open Spaces: Surveying the Pastoral Trope in Hollywood,” Musical Quarterly 85 (2001): 477-515.

  41. Variety, 12 May 1936; cited in Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 30-31. The notoriety of Strand's and Hurwitz's interest in Soviet models is apparent in Time, 25 May 1936, 27; and in W. L. White, “Pare Lorentz,” 8. One might speculate that Lorentz's reservations about “radicals” also affected his selection of Thomson to score The Plow and The River—certainly Aaron Copland and Roy Harris (two composers whom Lorentz had passed over) had stronger pro-Soviet sympathies during the mid-1930s.

  42. W. L. White, “Pare Lorentz,” 9. In his article “The Plow That Broke the Plains” (New Theatre [July 1936]: 18), Peter Ellis [Irving Lerner] presents a possibly more accurate version of this episode, claiming that the original scenario “embodied a concept of epic implications: capitalism's rape of the land, and—by extension—the impoverishment of all the natural resources of America: mines, forests, men.” In this account, after the RA became uneasy with this scenario, Lorentz modified the narration but not the image track; the photographers did not go “on strike,” but disclaimed responsibility for anything but the photography.

  43. VTP, 29A/145/6.

  44. Tommasini, Virgil Thomson, 283; W. L. White, “Pare Lorentz,” 10.

  45. Lorentz, McCall's, April 1940; reprinted in Lorentz on Film, 184.

  46. Study Guide, 35. Lorentz took two lines of his narration from Lange's photograph captions: “Blown out, baked out and broke” and “No place to go…and no place to stop.”

  47. Literary Digest, 16 May 1936, 22-23; Variety, 13 May 1936; preserved in VTP, 29A/145/6.

  48. Study Guide, 5; Literary Digest, 16 May 1936, 22; Copland's lecture on film music is cited in Lerner. “Music of Wide Open Spaces,” 485. See also Edwin Denby, “Thomson Scores for a New Deal Film,” Modern Music 13 (May-June 1936): 47.

  49. VTP, 29A/90/14; Lerner, “Classical Documentary,” 68; Margaret Larkin, The Singing Cowboy: A Book of Western Songs (New York: Oak Publications, 1931).

  50. Lorentz's notes to Thomson, pages 3-4. VTP, 29A/51/542.

  51. Study Guide, 8. The Study Guide includes the Turner thesis on its list of recommended reading, along with novels by Rölvaag, Cather, and Hamlin Garland, and numerous government publications.

  52. Lorentz's notes to Thomson. VTP, 29A/51/542.

  53. Study Guide, 28. Though the promotional materials for The Plow do not mention it, Lerner (“Classical Documentary, 125) cites A. J. Smithers, A New Excalibur: The Development of the Tank, 1909-1939 (London: Leo Cooper, 1986), on the shared technology of tractors and early tanks.

  54. VTP, 29A/51/542; see also Lerner, “Classical Documentary,” 127.

  55. See, among others, “George Stoney on The Plow and The River,” special feature on The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River, Post-Classical Ensemble, directed by Angel Gil-Ordóñez (Naxos DVD 2.110521). Karel Reisz treats this sequence in The Technique of Film Editing (London: Focal Press, 1953), 164.

  56. Snyder (Pare Lorentz, 38) gives the final cost of the film as over nineteen thousand dollars—well over the initial budget of six thousand dollars, but still so far below the typical Hollywood budget that the New York Herald Tribune, 26 May 1936, called The Plow “a wheezy, badly handicapped little effort,” and “far too crude, too amateurish and too painfully poor in its skeleton frame to offer entertainment.”

  57. See George Stoney in conversation with Joseph Horowitz (2 December 2005), “The Plow That Broke the Plains” and “The River,” Naxos DVD 2.110521; and Widgery, “Kinetic Temporal Interaction,” 204-5. John Cage attempted to explain away the aptness of Thomson's hymn texts: “The ironical appropriateness of these [hymn tune] titles need not be taken to mean that they have been chosen for their topical references. Quite the contrary. It is simply that tunes which have an expressive or characteristic quality usually end by getting themselves words of the same character.” Kathleen O'Connell Hoover and John Cage, Virgil Thomson: His Life and Music (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1959; Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 180-81.

  58. The “Buffalo Skinners” was one of Sandburg's favorite ballads. He considered its lyrics “blunt, direct, odorous, plain and made-to-hand, having the sound to some American ears that the Greek language of Homer had for the Greeks of that time.” Sandburg, quoted in Larkin, Singing Cowboy, 83.

  59. Larkin, Singing Cowboy, 85.

  60. VTP, 29A/51/542 see also Lerner, “Classical Documentary,” 138-41.

  61. Lerner, “Classical Documentary,” 138.

  62. Denby, “Thomson Scores,” 46-47. Denby's final adjective finds some unexpected support in Lorentz's instructions to Thomson for the “Devastation” scene: “The music I vaguely hear is a movement for bassoon and kettle drum—the bassoon mocking and the kettle drum warning and saying ‘I told you so.’” VTP, 29A/51/542.

  63. Variety, 13 May 1936, suggests that the plan to remove the epilogue originated shortly after the premiere: “Last reel is marred by inexcusably obvious boost for various government agencies involved in rehabilitating farmers in duststorm areas…. Sequence, which is completely out of keeping with the rest of the film, is being cut and may be revised along softer lines before film gets into general circulation.” William Alexander (Film on the Left, 140) states that the epilogue was removed “in the second or third year after The Plow's appearance.”

  64. The epilogue can be viewed among the appendixes on “The Plow That Broke the Plains” and “The River” (Naxos DVD 2.110521).

  65. Frank Nugent, “Raw Deal for the New Deal,” New York Times, 24 May 1936.

  66. VTP, 29A/51/542; see also Lerner, “Classical Documentary,” 77.

  67. Undated report by Addison Foster, held in the National Archives, Entry 266, Box 1446, A-Br; cited in Lerner, “Classical Documentary,” 80.

  68. VTP, 29A/51/542.

  69. Study Guide, 6.

  70. Lorentz, McCall's, July 1936; reprinted in Lorentz on Film, 136.

  71. “Says Film Loses a State,” New York Times, 4 August 1936; “Dust Bowl Film Brings Threat to Punch Tugwell,” New York Times, 10 June 1936.

  72. Mrs. R. L. Duke to Pare Lorentz; cited in Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 49.

  73. Francis Parkman, Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1892), xi.

  74. Lerner, “Classical Documentary,” 249.

  75. Lorentz continued: “If you feel you can build storm more completely without hymn then ignore cue at one minute—but the hymn still seems a natural part of the sequence to me.” VTP, 29A/51/542.

  76. Olin Downes, New York Times, 6 January 1943. In Downes's defense, one might observe that each tune contains a prominent four-note descent from tonic to dominant.

  77. VTP, 29A/51/542.

  78. Thomson, Virgil Thomson, 5.

  79. Joseph Horowitz, liner notes for “The Plow That Broke the Plains” and “The River” (Naxos DVD 2.110521); Lerner, “Classical Documentary,” 152.

  80. Lorentz, “Lorentz on
Film,” Program I; cited in Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 32.

  81. Text and details taken from Austin E. Fife and Alta S. Fife, eds., Cowboy and Western Songs: A Comprehensive Anthology, music edited by Mary Jo Schwab (N.p.: Clarkson N. Potter, 1969), 179-82.

  82. John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath (1939; repr. New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 272.

  83. “The Trail to Mexico” appears in Larkin, Singing Cowboy, but with no reference to Texas.

  84. Thomson, “Swing Music,” Modern Music 13 (May-June 1936): 12-17; see also “Swing Again,” Modern Music 15 (March-April 1938): 160-66.

  85. Thomson, “Swing Music,” 13.

  86. Study Guide, 31.

  7. HARVEST HOME

  1. Tommasini, Virgil Thomson, 289. Apparently, Kirstein also considered a ballet based on Thomson's film scores, but to my knowledge this never came to fruition. Kirstein to Thomson, 28 January [1950], VTP, 29/57/19.

  2. Wilfrid Mellers, Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1965), 87.

  3. Thomson, American Music since 1910 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 53-55. This and other excerpts of Thomson's writing on Copland are conveniently collected in Virgil Thomson: A Reader, Selected Writings, 1924-1984, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Routledge, 2002), 167-81.

  4. Lerner, “Music of Wide Open Spaces,” 510. After receiving Thomson's American Music since 1910, Lorentz wrote that Thomson's remarks on Copland were “quite justified”: “I have been irked over the years hearing some of your music coming out of his scores.” Lorentz to Thomson, 18 March 1971; VTP, 29A/154/79.

  5. Thomson, “Two Ballets,” New York Herald Tribune, 20 May 1945; reprinted in The Art of Judging Music (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), 162.

  6. See Daniel E. Mathers, “Expanding Horizons: Sexuality and the Re-zoning of The Tender Land,” in Copland Connotations: Studies and Interviews, ed. Peter Dickinson (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2002).

  7. Moore wrote to critic Harold C. Schonberg, “There's no Norwegian blood in me…. Sundgaard, though, is the son of Norwegian parents.” New York Times, 25 March 1951, 83. Sundgaard also wrote the libretto for Kurt Weill's Down in the Valley (1948).